WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus today (20 Jul) expressed deep concern “about the impact of the virus on indigenous peoples in the Americas, which remains the current epicentre of the pandemic.”
Dr Tedros said that “as of the 6th of July, more than 70,000 cases have been reported among indigenous peoples in the Americas, and more than 2,000 deaths. Most recently, at least 6 cases have been reported among the Nahua people, who live in the Peruvian Amazon.”
He said contact tracing is “one of the key tools for suppressing transmission in indigenous communities,” and stressed that “so-called lockdown measures can help to reduce transmission, but they cannot completely stop it. Contact tracing is essential for finding and isolating cases and identifying and quarantining their contacts.”
The Executive Director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, Michael Ryan, said there is “a continued acceleration of transmission in a number of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa,” and added that “we need to take what is happening in Africa very, very seriously. Many of those countries exist in the midst of fragility and conflict, many of them need external help and support.”
WHO’s COVID-19 Technical Lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, said, “many governments” are now applying the use of masks “as part of a comprehensive strategy, particularly in areas where you have active transmission and particularly in areas where you cannot do physical distancing.”
She expressed support for the use of masks “as one of the tools that can be put in place, however, it is not a substitute for other public health measures that also must be in place.”
For his part, WHO’s Assistant Director-Genera for Emergency Response, Ibrahima Socé Fall, said combatting Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) “is challenging in the context of COVID because the capital city in Kinshasa, many people are focusing on COVID-19. So, making sure that they don’t downplay Ebola is extremely important. We need also from the national side to scale up operations in all areas.”
In that regard, Ryan said, “the worrying aspects of this response is there have been cases in 21 health areas across seven health zones. So, while the numbers are very low, the disease is quite dispersed and five or seven of those health zones have had cases in the last four days, which means the disease is active, it’s not old. So, what we have is active disease in five health zones across a wide geographic area. Again, worrying is that there are still nine cases who are still in the community and there are real challenges in terms of community engagement and convincing people to come for care in Ebola treatment centres.”
According to the latest WHO COVID-19 situation report, there have been 14,043,176 confirmed cases worldwide, resulting in 597,583 confirmed deaths.